to where old chateaux in Picardy guard the Still 

 pollarded marais or deserted Breton manoirs Waters, 

 stand ghostly at the forest-end of untraversed 

 meres. 



These have their charm. But have they 

 for us the intimate and unchanging spell of 

 the lakes and meres and other still waters of 

 our own land ? Nothing, one might think, 

 could be more beautiful than to see in the 

 Lake of Como the cypresses of Bellaggio and 

 the sloping gardens of Cadenabbia meeting in 

 a new underwater wonderland : or to see 

 Mont Blanc, forty miles away, sleeping in 

 snow-held silence in the blue depths of Lac 

 Leman : or to see Pilatus and a new city 

 of Lucerne mysteriously changed and yet 

 familiarly upbuilded among the moving green 

 lawns and azure avenues of the Lake of the 

 Four Cantons. And yet leaning boulders of 

 granite, yellow with lichen and grey with 

 moss and deep-based among swards of heather 

 and the green nomad bracken, will create a 

 subtler magic in the brown depths of any 

 Highland loch. There is a subtler spell in 

 the solitary tarn, where the birch leans out 

 of the fern and throws an intricate tracery of 

 bough and branch into the un moving wave, 

 where the speckled trout and the speckled 

 mavis meet as in the strange companion- 

 259 



